I get the audio crackle also, been trying to figure it out for a while. Some people seem to have solved it by disabling power saving on the audio card. Didn’t work for me but might work for you.
cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/powersave
If it returns a “1” then power save is active
Bitwig works nicely and has been winning over some Ableton users. Reaper has a Linux version and Ardour is a pretty popular Linux DAW
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge
I’ve been meaning to give this a try but not got around to it yet.
Oh yeah, I also had to change the nvidia driver to the legacy version. Yes, my computer is ancient.
Try setting proton to version 7 in steam. I had a similar issue and it was down to having an older gpu that wasn’t compatible with stuff the newer proton releases were doing.
A man of taste I see 👍